ABSTRACT
The integration process has had an impact on the domestic policies, politics and polities of European Union (EU) member states, on candidate countries and third countries targeted by the European Neighbourhood Policy (ENP). This impact is investigated by “Europeanization” studies. This chapter addresses the interaction of feminist and gender scholarship with the Europeanization literature and its different streams. Europeanization does not rely upon a fully-fledged, empirically tested theory, but rather derives from the analysis of top-down implications of what have long been framed as only bottom-up processes. As member states voluntarily conceded competences to a supranational entity, they got caught in a process of adaptation to EU norms, policy instruments and “ways of doing things” generating a number of scenarios for convergence, divergence or norm contestation, depending on domestic settings, actors and policy domains. Europeanization scholars have attempted to make sense of diverse situations, investigating facilitation and causality mechanisms, different logics underpinning norm adaptation and subsequent policy change, as well as actors’ configurations or conflicting discursive uses of the EU.
